Second Words: Selected Critical Prose 1960–1982

By Margaret Atwood

Reissued in a handsome A List edition, the largest collection of critical prose to date from world renowned author and poet Margaret Atwood, featuring an introduction by Lennie Goodings.

Originally published in 1982, Second Words brings together fifty of Margaret Atwood’s finest essays and reviews spanning two decades, beginning in 1962, with an introduction and commentary by the author.

With her incomparable wit and originality, Atwood discusses the process of writing and the literary life, with insightful looks at the work of such figures as Erica Jong, E. L. Doctorow, Northrop Frye, Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and many more. In several pieces, we see the development of her ideas on Canadian identity and the American dream, as well as her controversial attitudes toward feminism, sexism, and the strange mythologies imposed on men and women in contemporary North America.

Second Words remains the largest collection of Atwood’s critical prose to date.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 1995
• ISBN: 9780887849107

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of over fifty books, including fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning television series, her works include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-Seed; The Testaments, which won the Booker Prize and was long-listed for the Giller Prize; and the poetry collection Dearly. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in Great Britain for her services to literature. She lives in Toronto.

Book preview

PART I

1960-1971

Part I: 1960-1971

I began reviewing books and writing about writing where many people, do: at college, in my case for Acta Victoriana, the literary magazine of Victoria College, University of Toronto. To say that there wasn’t a long lineup for editorial positions would be an understatement. It was 1960 and cashmere sweaters and pearl-button earrings were still in, except among the few interested in the arts, for whom they were definitely out. Black was in.

So a handful of us, all in black, not only edited the magazine but practically wrote the whole thing, under pseudonyms and otherwise. I’ve spared you my pseudonymous parodies of Layton and Frye….

I notice that I was reviewing Canadian books exclusively, even though, I recall, none of us thought it was really possible to be a genuine writer and remain in Canada. The appearance of books by young writers like Marie-Claire Blais was, for us, a beginning.

Between 1961 and 1971, fate and the need for jobs took me to Harvard, back to Toronto, to Vancouver, back to Harvard, where I was working on material connected with the Superwoman essay here included, to Montreal, to Edmonton, to England, France and Italy, and finally back to Toronto in 1971, where I joined the Board of Directors of Anansi Press and, in 1972, wrote and published Survival. In the meantime I had of course published a number of books, but my reviewing activities were limited; I did some things for people who asked, mainly George Woodcock of Canadian Literature and James Reaney of Alphabet and Daryl Hine of Poetry. By 1967 Coach House Press and House of Anansi had been established, and the rapid growth of Canadian publishing that characterized the late ’60’s and early ’70’s was underway.

My reviewing activities weren’t unconnected with my own writing at this time, which included, for instance, Susanna Moodie and Power Politics, and, in 1970-71, Surfacing, which must have been started (or re-started, since I actually began it in 1965) shortly after I’d written Nationalism, Limbo and the Canadian Club; which itself marks a transition, since it was my first piece in anything meant for an audience which was not primarily literary.

1

Some Sun for this Winter

(1961)

Winter Sun is an appropriate title for the first book of collected poems by Margaret Avison, a Canadian poet of already considerable standing. The title, like so many of the poems themselves, is not merely what it seems. One might, at first glance, take it as a hint about the prevailing mood of the contents, and it does indeed evoke the bleak sombre bareness of the Toronto watery-sunlight winters that provide material for much in the book. But although Miss Avison’s light is a winter light, it is still the sun: a particular sun which is capable of rendering immediate appearance transparent as the glass of a lens.

One always runs the danger, when speaking of a poet’s reality beyond the finite, of branding the poet as a floaty-footed and cloudy-headed mystic whose vision, although it may be directed upwards, tends to encounter nothing but fog. (In Toronto, of course, the fog has at least some relation to actual experience.) To identify Miss Avison with this cliché would be sticking the label on the wrong bottle. She has her feet firmly on the ground (usually the cinder mash or cool tar of the city poems); her vision is always focused to, and through, specific concrete reality rather than past it. Again, if one praises a poet’s descriptive powers, one risks conveying the image of a housewife cooking up a poem (of the Oh Beautiful Sunset or Hooray For Autumn variety) by applying adjectives to an object like icing to a cake, with the same result: if one swallows much of it, one feels a little ill. But Miss Avison never slathers her poems. Her use of descriptive words is not only precise and striking, but so precise and striking that the words do not just describe the object but are the object: there are other tennis players in both art and life, but her tennis players, albinos bonded in their flick and flow, are the only ones of their kind.

She pares her works to the core, and throws out all extraneous and diluting verbal peelings. The result of this critical cutting and sorting is a highly condensed poetic texture which demands a lot of conscious concentration on the part of the reader. For example:

       … The even-bread

Of earth smokes rainbows. Blind stars and swallows parade

       the windy sky of streets

             and cheering beats

down faintly, to leaves in sticks, insects in pleats

             and pouches hidden

       and micro-garden….

Winter Sun is not a chocolate-covered poetic pill, guaranteed to taste nice, go down easily, and eliminate all need for effort. Such sweetness would be useless in its universe:

Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.

The optic heart must venture: a jail-break

And re-creation.

Miss Avison portrays consciousness as an attempt to encounter and to form a relationship with the external; the ultimate locus of such an encounter is the individual human mind, which makes its ordered cosmos out of a chaos which includes bits of society, scraps of sense perception, snips of science, moments of history, chips of myth, and the elbowings of the insistent self, as well as the phenomena of the natural universe. Her ordered structure is built of various poetic forms, among them simple lyric stanzas, unconventional sonnets, blank verse, and highly disciplined irregular lines which avoid the free and all-too-easy idiom of the contemporary common denominator. Her verbal wit is considerable, but never coy; her humour subtle, sometimes ironic, but always wise; her human warmth (a warmth which is connected with a strong sense of nostalgia) is most evident in the last, longest, and most definitely not least poem, The Agnes Cleves Papers.

In the last analysis, the poetic eye sees its own world, a world which both reflects and transcends the formlessness of the finite world outside, and reality becomes internal:

        … Gentle and just pleasure

It is, being human, to have won from space

This unchill, habitable interior

Which mirrors quietly the light

Of the snow, and the new year.

Winter Sun is a book not to be read, on any account, just once.

2

Narcissus

Double Entendre

(1961)

Alphabet, a new semi-annual edited by James Reaney, is indicative of a growing tendency to regard the individual piece of writing neither as an isolated phenomenon nor as a part of its author’s total outlook or output but as a work whose real context is provided by literature as a whole. Thus, the structure is thematic rather than haphazard (as it would be in a review); and one is well advised to begin at the beginning and end at the end. (Presumably, the absence of a table of contents is intended to discourage browsing.) Such an arrangement is designed both to relate the various works to each other and to a central figure —Narcissus this issue —and to place them along an axis whose poles are Art and Life. Just about everything fits, from the poetry, (by James Reaney, Jay Macpherson, and Daryl Hine, among others), to Jay Macpherson’s pertinent article Narcissus: Some Uncertain Reflections, to Hope Arnott Lee’s autobiographical account of the difficulties of twinship, to John Peter’s book review which presents a billboard image of Irving Layton as a phallus-waving self-absorbed mirror-gazer.

There are dangers in this sort of selection: for instance, one feels that some of the pieces have to be stretched a little to fit the bed on which Mr. Reaney would have them lie. Also, in reading Alphabet: A Semiannual Devoted to the Iconography of the Imagination, and Reaney’s editorial, one must be careful not to confuse the terms symbol, myth, and icon, which are tossed around quite freely. One of the main pitfalls of iconographic writing is over-stylization, or the development of stereotypes; so far, Alphabet has avoided it successfully.

A word must be said in defence of the format, which should not really need any. There seems to be some feeling that Alphabet, being an experimental magazine, should have printed the titles sideways or indulged in some other pseudoartsy puerility to make itself look experimental, instead of adopting its rather conservative design. Considering that it was handset by Reaney himself (which accounts for the educational spelling mistakes and the wobbly lines) and that the emphasis in any literary magazine should be on content rather than appearance, one feels that the editor was well advised to keep things simple.

In conclusion, it should be made clear that Alphabet is not just another little magazine. It is, in a very lively sense, a way of looking at things. Besides which, (to quote the editor again) it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

If Reaney were looking for support of his view that symbolism is a fact of our cultural life, he need look no farther than Mad Shadows. This is the English title of La Belle Bête, a novel by the young French-Canadian writer Marie-Claire Blais. It is a book that will perturb the reader who is committed to the doctrine of realism, in the sense of naturalism or social realism, in fiction. If one looks for any but the most fleeting reflections of the contemporary French-Canadian scene, one will be looking for the wrong thing. The most fitting context for Mad Shadows is a mythological one: the most fitting myth, Narcissus.

Practically all the characters in the book are, in some way, Narcissus-figures; practically all are, in addition, either physically or spiritually warped. The central figure, Patrice, is a Beautiful Beast who is in love with his own image. His jealous sister Isabelle-Marie is clever, sadistic, and ugly. Their mother, Louise, dotes on Patrice as the image of herself and refuses to admit that he is an idiot. (She spends so much time mirror-gazing that one keeps expecting, Mirror mirror on the wall…. ) Lanz, her lover, is also her double—elegant, sensual and hollow. Both their beauties are deceptive: Louise’s face is eventually destroyed by disease, and Lanz is a paste-up composed of a false beard and wig and a gold cane.

The handling of the characters is direct and forceful. The reader is often told about them rather than left to infer, much as a folk-legend tells that a princess is good and a step-mother wicked. The technique has its drawbacks; for instance, when Isabelle-Marie is rather incongruously described as a creature of innate purity, or when Patrice asks, after his sister has disfigured him by pushing his head into boiling water, Mother, why didn’t you tell me that I was an idiot? The plot is treated in the same forthright manner. Time goes forward in a straight narrative line (no flashbacks); again, much in the style of the folk-myth. The action is violent, as are all the deaths; and emotions throughout are of the extremest nature.

Mad Shadows might be accused of melodrama, were it not for its saving graces. Because the book is completely self-sustaining and self-contained, small defects may easily be passed over and exaggerations accepted. The world of Miss Blais is not that of so-called real life. It is a world of the imagination, of myth, somehow more real for its exclusion of sociological paraphernalia. It possesses almost ritual undertones, and is able to create strangely evocative images out of strangely intense relationships. It gets down to the primal, and sacrifices naturalism and subtlety in the process; but the sacrifice is justified in a work so rewardingly original.

The total effect is overpowering; one almost needs a page of Henry James as an antidote.

3

Apocalyptic Squawk from a Splendid Auk

(1959)

The Cruising Auk, like its namesake, is a member of a rare and all-but-extinct species: the book of humorous verse which somehow manages to be also a book of poetry. George Johnston achieves this hybrid result by refusing to take himself, or any of his other subjects, seriously—but by taking the demands of his form and language seriously enough to do them admirable justice.

Mr Johnston’s subjects are delightfully trivial—and almost always small. His universe is a backyard pond —somewhat puddly and muddy, but teeming with lively bits and pieces of life and half-life. The blithe spirits which Mr Johnston calls from this vasty deep include neighbourhood notables like Boom, the pompous sufferer, who knows

what is and what

In spiritual things is not,

and Goom, who sips at Life, but doesn’t know

Whether it’s really good or bad

Its sweetest moments sour so;

Mr Murple, his underslung long dog, and his gindrinking mother; a sprinkling of timorous virgins (virginal with a truly Canadian practicality), and several other youngish ladies whose very abandon has a sort of grim determination. There are also poor nervous Edward:

In the short sharp winter twilight

When the beans are in to cook

Edward under the trilight

Reads a detective book;

various other cowed males, and a formidable caste of wormy aunts and assorted old ladies. All, like the sweetish aunt, Beleek, are slightly rotten —and their progeny all empathize with Eliot’s Mrs Porter, either in thought or in deed. The bird’s-eye of Mr Johnston’s Auk focuses on more than the worms, however. His children are exuberantly innocent (for instance, Andrew in Kind Offices) or painfully tender:

The wind blows, and with a little broom

She sweeps across the cold clumsy sky.

His sketches of the city are lightly done, but with affection and a train-whistle kind of nostalgia:

One hears a sink

And low voices, rustling feet;

Clocks in the town put by the night,

Hour by hour, ticked and right.

He reveals the small well-meaning suburbanite, living life with a quieter than usual desperation:

I’ve got time in my clocks

And beer in my cellar and spiders in my windows;

I can’t spend time nor drink all the beer

And I feel in the spread web the spider’s small eye.

The really remarkable thing about The Cruising Auk is not, however, the subjects themselves, but the author’s treatment of them. The poems are surprisingly simple in form and image. Their ironic and often hilarious effect comes from the aptness of the choice of words and, above all, from the timing. A simple comic-verse rhythm and a punchline sequence tend to become tedious after the first five minutes (as anyone who has read too much Robert W. Service or Rudyard Kipling at a time will know); but Johnston, because he uses his rather exacting forms with a great deal of variety, never bores. Several poems fail in total effect—surely A Little Light and Yeats’ Ghost are below the usual standard —but they are interesting failures, at least.

Throughout the book, Mr Johnston preserves an objectivity that allows his verses to be humour rather than invective. Even when jabbing a favourite dusty aunt he is amused and amusing rather than spiteful. Like the splendid Auk, he remains detached:

Surely his eye belittles our despair

Our unheroic mornings, afternoons

Disconsolate in the echo-laden air…

The product of his peripatetic musings is a collection poetic enough to delight even the most literate of the literati, and hilarious enough to soothe the most book-shy quarterback to a charming diffidence.

4

Kangaroo & Beaver

Tradition in Exile

by J. P. Matthews

(1962)

The subtitle of this book, A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, indicates the highly amorphous nature of the material. Any author who attempts to grapple this subject is threatened by engulfment, as if by a giant amoeba, and Dr Matthews is to be congratulated on the degree to which he imposes form on such a sprawling mass of tenuously related data. It is perhaps not his fault that he has had to snip and stretch a little to fit the past neatly into his Procrustean structure.

Comparative studies have a way of becoming invidious, and this one is no exception. Dr Matthews establishes two opposed sets of categories. Colonialism is seen in two aspects: one ignores the indigenous and strives to emulate the mother country, the other reacts against its parent and turns in upon itself. There are two corresponding kinds of poetry: the Academic and the Popular. These contrasts are acceptable, but they are made to imply doubtful value judgements: Popular Nationalism per se is a Good Thing; Australia has always had, for historical, social, and geographical reasons, more of it; therefore Australian poetry is potentially better than Canadian poetry, which has always attempted to lean on its English heritage and to deal with universals rather than particulars. Dr Matthews’ attitude is best illustrated by a metaphor: … those who would avoid the growing pains and the unsightly pimples of adolescence by trying to jump prematurely to precocious maturity must pay some price for their action. He sees Nineteenth Century Australia as a healthy normal growing boy and Canada as a miniature mimicking adult; but better pimples than overgroomed priggishness. The image of the Bushman, virile, lawless, unwashed and above all virile, composing four-line ballad verses with irrepressible gusto, is set up against a pale straw-man of a nail-gnawing Canadian intellectual, smothered in Englishness, bleating and effete.

A Canadian reader is apt to be puzzled by some of this. Why is the Academic, as represented, for instance, by Lampman, necessarily worse than a Robert W. Service Popularity? Aha! Dr Matthews would snort. "You see, that’s just the kind of question an Academic Canadian would ask! Still, he doesn’t really answer the question. The undesirability of all the qualities he lumps under Academicism" is, for him, axiomatic rather than hypothetical.

Such an approach has its drawbacks. Confined by his rigid a priori two-category system, Dr Matthews sometimes has difficulty finding pigeonholes that fit the particular clay pigeons he singles out for potting. Thus, Souster, Dudek, and Layton have denounced Academic poetry in Canada, but they have not become, in any sense, Popular poets. Theirs is a cerebral poetry, intellectual in conception and not concerned with reaching a mass audience. (The picture of Irving Layton coyly retiring into an ivory tower is, to say the least, naive.)

However, apart from its suppressed flag-waving, Tradition in Exile is informed, thoroughly documented, and comprehensive. Dr Matthews’ skeleton-in-the-closet clutching the somewhat flaccid vitals of modern Canadian poetry is overdrawn but nonetheless relevant: Canadians need to be reminded from time to time that their poetry did not spring fully-formed from the head of A. J. M. Smith. The book is well-organized though inclined to be repetitious; the prose smacks of Ph. D. thesisisms but manages to make itself palatable; and the many quotations, often from little-known sources, are of considerable value. Whatever else it does, and despite the my-daddy’s-better-than-your-daddy attitude, Tradition in Exile ought to encourage Canadian interest in Australian literature.

5

F. D. Reeve

Aleksandr Blok

(1963)

Aleksandr Blok, the important almost-modern Russian Symbolist poet, has hitherto been unduly neglected in the West. F. D. Reeve’s book is an evaluation of his work in its relation both to the literary and political activities of Blok’s contemporaries and to the somewhat New-Critical microscope of the modern scholar. Any English-language effort to make Blok’s work known in the terms with which we have come to regard poetry during the last forty years would be in danger of wrecking itself on the language-barrier if it took a too-textural approach; but Reeve avoids this peril by supplying translations literal enough to render his comments understandable (though, inevitably, form and mood are often lost), and by drawing in enough historical, biographical, and theoretical material to make his close analysis of the poems meaningful for a non-Russian-speaking reader.

Of course that many-headed hydra Symbolism rears its perplexing heads. Reeve takes a few passing swipes at them in the first chapter and stirs up a tangled nest of question-marks. This chapter may owe its comparative turgidity both to the necessity of dealing with a large subject in a small space and to the Peer-Gynt’s-Onionism of which the whole Symbolist movement is suspiciously redolent. That, in evoking transcendental reality, the Symbolists often skirted the edges of a spurious cultism, is especially evident in the passages of prose theory quoted. Even if the Symbolists themselves knew what they were talking about, we never will: the vaguely-religious central Mystery was poetically useful for them only as long as it remained arcane.

But the Russian Symbolist movement was only a background for Blok. He himself disliked the label and preferred to be regarded as an individual, which is largely how Reeve treats him. The staccato biographical sections outline the events in his personal life that lay behind his poetic career. The critical portions trace his early emergence as a celebrator of the Beautiful Lady (a static mystical symbol analogous to Yeats’ early Rose), of whom Belyi remarked, The Beautiful Lady turned out to be the most venomous caterpillar, later decaying into a whore and an imaginary quantity something like the square root of minus one, and the rapid development of his poetry in much more vital and inclusive directions as he searched for a means of bridging the gap between external actuality and his subjective transcendental world.

Reeve’s stress on the affinities of Blok’s lyric poems with dramatic forms, an emphasis natural for any critic familiar with Yeats’ theory of masks, is particularly helpful in his brilliant analysis of The Twelve, which, quoting Medvedev, he sees as ’an original modification of the old romantic plot several times before used by Blok—Columbine-Pierrot-Harlequin.’ He denies that it is a Communist manifesto: Its political associations are not so much intentional as merely coincidental. Its design is apolitical. It is a poem about revelation. His excerpts from Blok’s diary support his interpretation: Blok’s attitude was obviously that of a dramatist rather than a dogmatist.

Reeve’s book is probably the best and most comprehensive study of Blok written in English. Despite its occasional murkiness, it is stimulating reading for anyone concerned with the history of modern poetry.

6

Superwoman Drawn and Quartered

The Early Forms of She

(1965)

You are a whale at parables and allegories and one thing reflecting another.

—Rudyard Kipling, in a letter to Rider Haggard.

Rider Haggard is a writer whom it is difficult to approach with straight face and serious intent. Though he wrote most of his early novels in an attitude of the most extreme High Seriousness, the reader tends to treat them as though they were comic books, and read them, if at all, on the sly. He had great success, both popular and critical, during the last decades of the nineteenth century and was ranked with Kipling and Stevenson, yet to-day his particular combination of high-flown rhetoric and bathos brings a wince to the sensitive nostril of the stylistic analyst, while those willing to go further than the flawed surfaces of his prose in search of significant archetypes may well founder in a morass of half-grasped symbols, promising but dead-end literary references, and only semi-mythic plots. The usual judgements made are of two kinds: The Adventure Yarn stance in which King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and the later adventure stories are praised for their internal coherence, excitement of plot, and fidelity to exotic detail and claimed as cognates of Kipling and Stevenson and direct antecedents of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the muscle-flexing hard-hunting male mags, and (ultimately, with an effort) of Hemingway; and the Burning Imagination approach which places Haggard’s romances with such late-flowering allegorical fantasies as George Macdonald’s Lilith and W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age and singles out She for special praise. The latter approach habitually includes a tribute from Henry Miller (note the dust-jacket on any modern edition) and leads to such statements as, The story… has bewitching power, the sort one is accustomed to meet only in superior works of art such as ’Christabel’ and some of Poe’s masterpieces. Those eager for more literary parallels may see the mysterious central figure of She as someone who ought to have been included in Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony: another appearance of the Fatal Woman, a literary sister of Pater’s Mona Lisa and of Swinburne’s various vampire Venuses. Such peripheral connections abound, but the difficulty remains, and seems to be one which is inseparable from the study of any interesting but second-rate writer: many comments are possible but none seem necessary.

Haggard said of She, There is what I shall be remembered by, and one might be content to read, remember accordingly, and leave it at that. The motives for going further are similar to those that connect themselves with jigsaw puzzles: curiosity, an assumption that the pieces can be fitted together somehow, and a desire to see what the total picture looks like: for She remained a puzzle to Haggard, unsolved, unresolved, throughout his life. He did not consider the novel finished, and wrote three sequels to it which he thought of as approaches towards ultimate Truth but which only succeed in thickening the metaphysical mists which cloud the first novel. He was obsessed with the personality of Ayesha, the central figure in She, and offers various lame hints of her meaning in letters to his friends; for instance, "Of course the whole thing is an effort to trace the probable effects of immortality upon the mortal unregenerate. She’s awful end is also in some sense a parable —for what are Science and Learning and the consciousness of Knowledge and Power in the face of Omnipotence? The same event happened to them all —and like She in all her loneliness they are liable to be resolved ’with laughter and hideous mockery’ into what they really are. At least that is what I want to convey; but the reader tends to share the perplexity of the Editor" when he says, in the introduction to She, At first I was inclined to believe that this history of a woman, clothed in the majesty of her almost endless years, on whom the shadow of Eternity itself lay like the dark wing of Night, was some gigantic allegory of which I could not catch the meaning.

She does indeed bear some resemblance to a gigantic allegory, but it reads like a Faerie Queene from which the supporting theological and political substructures have been removed: the emblematic topography and the stylized figures are present but they have no specific referents. A search for this missing factor, the book’s ideological structure, leads backwards toward its possible sources. She was written in six weeks, and Haggard himself says of its genesis, I remember that when I sat down to the task my ideas as to its development were of the vaguest. The only clear notion that I had in my head was that of an immortal woman inspired by an immortal love. All the rest shaped itself round this figure. And it came —it came faster than my poor aching hand could set it down. One biographer concludes that Haggard was writing deep, as though hypnotized, and proceeds to connect She with the world of the psychological unconscious and with scraps of past experience such as Haggard’s childhood fear of an ugly rag doll of particularly hideous aspect which came to be named She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, his early discovery of the terror of death, his interest in antiquity and myth, and his adventures in Africa. These associations are doubtless valid as far as they go; however, they relate only to some of the incidental detail and can explain neither the unresolved plot nor the ambiguous central personalities of She.

A more directly productive territory for pattern-hunters is available, in the five works of fiction that Haggard wrote during the three years before he wrote She. Two of these are the Adventure Yarns already mentioned; two are usually dismissed as bad Gothic Romances in which the people he creates are caricatures illustrating maxims; and the fifth is classed as a realistic novel which expresses the bitterness Haggard felt over the ceding of the Transvaal to the Boers. Yet these five books, when examined, are found to contain, not only unmistakable suggestions of every thematic element that makes She an unusual book, but also the gradual development of the personality of Ayesha, She herself. Haggard may have been writing deep, as though hypnotized; but if so the unconscious experience he was drawing upon was the creation of his previous books. The problematical themes and the patterns of She had been present in his work since the writing of his first work of fiction.

Before attempting to catalogue the pertinent elements of character and imagery in the earlier works it would be well to outline the main features of She. The plot turns upon an assumption of cyclical reincarnation. Although the story takes place in the nineteenth century, its events were set in motion two thousand years before, when Ayesha killed Kallikrates, the man she loved, through jealousy of his wife, an Egyptian princess named Amenartas for whom he had broken his vows as a priest of Isis. Ayesha, having obtained virtual immortality by bathing in the fires of the Place of Life, a cavern in the heart of a mountain, has spent the intervening centuries brooding over the preserved body of her lover and waiting for his next incarnation. Amenartas fled from Africa and gave birth to a son, through whom her story has passed along a line of descendents to Leo Vincey, an Englishman who decides to explore the mystery with his guardian Horace Holly. They reach Kor after a perilous journey across the ocean, through vast fever-ridden swamps and through a maze of tunnels in Kor’s surrounding mountains. Leo is almost killed three times: once during a storm on the ocean, once by the Amahaggar, the cannibalistic matrilineal tribes who are under the government of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and once by swamp-fever; however he is preserved the first time by Holly, the second by Ustane, a native girl who has attached herself to him as a wife, and finally by She herself.

Ayesha, or She, makes her appearance halfway through the book. From the first she is a split personality, or so she appears to the story’s narrator, Holly. With her immortality she has gained an irresistible superhuman beauty, a rich and imperial shape, instinct with a life that was more than life, and with a certain serpent-like grace which was more than human; she is described in terms of divinity, her expression one of a godlike stamp of softened power, which shone upon that radiant countenance like a living halo. But her beauty is sinister: "I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—or rather, at the time it impressed me as evil…. Never before had I guessed what beauty made sublime could be —and yet, the sublimity was a dark one —the glory was not all of heaven…. It bore stamped upon it a seal of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion."

The ambiguity of Ayesha’s moral nature is reflected in two opposed groups of associations. The sinister ones suggest the power and evil of witchcraft. In the chapter entitled A Soul in Hell, she is described as a white sorceress, a modern Circe; she curses her dead rival Amenartas with an appalling malevolence and an awful vindictiveness. With her immortality she has also acquired supernatural intelligence and supernatural power; she can kill by the force of her will alone, and it is thus that she destroys Ustane, who, the reader is led to believe, is a reincarnation of Amenartas. She is a mistress of illusion, a mindreader with the ability to see events at a distance (though she herself says, There is no such thing as magic, though there is knowledge of the hidden ways of Nature, and to enchant and mesmerize, as she mesmerizes Leo over the corpse of Ustane, compelling him to yield to her, much against his better nature.

On the positive side, she is connected with a statue that stands in the ruins of Kor, a winged female figure representing Truth, perhaps the grandest allegorical work of Art that the genius of her children has ever given the world. The inscription reads, in part, Behold! Virgin art thou, and Virgin thou shalt go till time be done. There is no man born of woman who may draw thy veil and live, nor shall be. By Death only can thy veil be drawn, O Truth. Ayesha’s earlier comparison of herself with the goddess Artemis whose unveiling meant death for Actaeon —I too, O Holly, am a Virgin goddess —underlines the identification, as does Holly’s rather obvious comment: As usual, Ayesha was veiled like the marble Truth, and it struck me then that she might have taken the idea of covering up her beauty from the statue. When she is seen as the embodiment of this ideal of ultimate Truth, she is more perfect—and in a way more spiritual —than ever woman was before her.

That her double nature is split also into eternal youth and extreme age is first divined by Holly in his dream of a Nightmare Life-in-Death: Then in the background of the vision a draped form hovered continually which, from time to time, seemed to draw the coverings from its body, revealing now the perfect shape of a lovely blooming woman, and again the white bones of a grinning skeleton, which, as it veiled and unveiled, uttered an apparently meaningless sentence: ’That which is alive hath known death and that which is dead yet can never die, for in the circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten. Holly first sees Ayesha as a swathed mummy-like form, and is then astounded by the freshness of her beauty when she unveils; but her skeleton aspect overtakes her in the Place of Life, where she has led Holly and Leo in order to let them become as immortal as herself. She passes through the fire again in order to demonstrate its effects for Leo, but somehow its powers are reversed: suddenly the weight of her great age falls upon her and she shrivels into a monkeylike figure no larger than a big ape, and dies. Holly exclaims with horror over this withered embyro, "And yet—it was the same woman," and the unification of opposites—ugliness and beauty, youth and age, the desirable and the sinister—is complete in the Place of Life, now identical with the Place of Death.

Yet the symmetry of the pattern, and even its effectiveness as a parable of the nature of Nature (which seems to be one of the meanings Haggard thought he intended) is disturbed by the presence of Ustane. Ayesha’s true moral nature is inevitably connected with the justice of her murder of Ustane. Ayesha herself says, her sin is that she stands between me and my desire, but this is hardly an adequate excuse. Ustane is portrayed throughout with great sympathy: she saves Leo’s life at the risk of her own, nurses him during his critical fever with absolute devotion, and defies Ayesha with what Holly calls moral courage and intrepidity. At no time is it suggested that Ustane is evil: rather it is Ayesha whose sin is constantly emphasized and whom Leo calls a fiend and murderess for her deed. But Leo must judge between the two, and he eventually chooses Ayesha. As in most nineteenth-century romances in which the hero must decide between two women, the choice is of great importance: he is choosing a fate, a soul, and, ultimately, an ideology. Although it is clear by the end of the book that Leo considers his choice of Ayesha to have been the right or good choice, and that the murder of the innocent Ustane is thereby condoned (Holly even writes a footnote rationalizing it), it is never made clear what Ustane is supposed to represent, and therefore what two sets of values Leo is really choosing between. She might be considered an occasion for one more demonstration of Ayesha’s power and her defiance of conventional morality, were it not for the hints that identify her with Amenartas and the predictions that future reincarnations will somehow involve a struggle between Ayesha and the other woman for the control of Leo’s soul.

Other versions of the same battle take place in the earlier books. Since all six books, including She, tend to have a common vocabulary of images and symbols, it is possible to trace the character-types as the moral values assigned to them shift from book to book. The hero himself tends to be static: he is always an English Gentleman, and, in the love triangles and rectangles, always displays the passivity of a bone being disputed among dogs. From the beginning of his writing career the heroines seem to be Haggard’s major interest. The first novel, Dawn, written in 1883, has been called a shapeless anthology of two-dimensional actors, vague symbolism,… and blood-curdling horror-stories, but although the plot is somewhat involved, the relationships among the female figures are almost diagrammatic. There are three central women —one good, one bad, and one either both or neither—with hair to match, in the traditions of the nineteenth-century romance convention (blonde, black, and chestnut). The good woman is Angela, after whom the first version of the book was named (Haggard re-wrote it on the advice of a publisher). She is a pale blonde Ideal, chiefly associated with great intelligence, and a spiritual beauty. But how it is possible to describe on paper a presence at once so full of grace and dignity, of the soft loveliness of woman, and of a higher and more spiritual beauty? the author asks, and proceeds to devote a page to such description, scattering references to saints, the harps of Heaven, and Angela’s spirit look with lyric fervour. Like Ayesha she is a marble goddess, but her symbolic statue is not Truth but a marble Andromeda that adorns the villain’s study and is the only thing saved from the fire that eventually consumes his house. Each of the three women in Dawn has a philosophy, and Angela’s is a pure belief in individual immortality. She says to the hero, Arthur Heigham (who is obsessed by death, and of course chooses a graveyard by moonlight as the setting for his proposal), I am sure that when our trembling hands have drawn the veil from Death, we shall find his features, passionless indeed, but very beautiful. Towards the end of the book, when she thinks she has lost Arthur, she writes him a long letter expressing the belief that their fates are linked eternally and that she will join him after death. It is of interest that in the first version of the novel Angela was doomed to an early death, presumably leaving Arthur to be semi-consoled by the chestnut-haired lady, Mildred Carr.

Mildred is a doll-like widow who